Futurist Amy Webb has some concerns about the future

"If companies want to see the local economy flourish, they have a financial stake in making sure the people who live in Detroit are connected (to the internet)," futurist Amy Webb said.

The Future Today Institute founder was in Detroit on Wednesday, concerned about data privacy regulation, bias in technology and how local journalists are thinking about what's next for news. But there are things we can do now to change the course.

Why is futurist Amy Webb feeling not so great about the next 20 years?

On Wednesday, the Community Foundation for Southeast Michigan and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation launched "Future of Information: Media, Technology and Democracy," a yearlong event series on the future of information in communities.

"Accurate, reliable, accessible information is important to how communities work," said Mariam Noland, president of the Community Foundation for Southeast Michigan. "Our goal is to start a conversation."

Webb is a professor of strategic foresight at the NYU Stern School of Business and founder of the Future Today Institute.

Ahead of her talk at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History in Detroit, Crain's spoke with Webb about data privacy, local journalism and what we can do right now to make an optimistic version of the future come true.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

Crain's: Tell me about what you do, as a futurist.

Webb:My job is to collect quantitative and also qualitative data — to look for weak signals within that data, find emerging patterns and then, from that, map emerging trends. Those trends are not the end game — they're the foundation for what becomes risk and opportunity scenarios. My job is not to predict the future, because that's not possible. My job is to figure out, given what we know to be true today, using data, where are we likely to be X number of years from now — and to try to figure that out early enough so that companies aren't making decisions under duress.

Crain's: It's good timing for you to be giving this talk today, with (Facebook CEO) Mark Zuckerberg testifying before Congress. Are people starting to lose trust in these platforms and question the issue of data privacy?

Webb: This is not the first privacy breach to happen in our lifetimes — we've had massive breaches at financial institutions. Remember Yahoo? Massive breach there. And yet it hasn't stopped us from using technology, and for all of the media attention #DeleteFacebook has gotten, the reality is that plenty of people are still using Facebook. In the year 2018, surveillance, under which we all voluntarily operate, is the business model powering a lot of our modern technology companies. Mark Zuckerberg is on The Hill today testifying, but yesterday, nobody asked him any substantive questions, and it was pretty clear to me that the lawmakers who were asking those questions didn't have enough foundational expertise to even understand how to have that conversation.

We've essentially operated with zero regulatory oversight in the United States when it comes to our data and our privacy. We keep having what seem to be one-off blips, but they're not. If you think that Cambridge Analytica is the only company that benefited, that's the other strange piece of it that no one seems to be addressing — did they have some kind of secret partnership (with Facebook)? Of course not. Facebook's business model is predicated on surveillance.

We have ceded regulatory issues to the platforms that continue to insist that they're just the platforms. That tactic in Europe wound up resulting in the General Data Protection Regulation — a sweeping hammer of regulations that go into effect on May 25 that will be impossible to enforce and that, as I will explain today, will result in "splinternets" — different versions of the Internet.

So Facebook over the past couple of months has been writing their own regulations that they describe as industry-leading ... that will ultimately not do very much.

And today is Facebook. Nobody is talking about Google or Amazon. You could argue that Amazon has way more information about us than Facebook, and so does Google.

Crain's: Right. We're all bringing Alexa into our home and talking to her about our lives.

Webb: And that's a whole other issue — that we have invested our technology with gendered characteristics.

The entire voice-based ecosystem has been predicated on this 1950s "Mad Men"-style female secretary. This is important, because there is enormous amount of bias that has already crept into these systems — it has to do with gendered interfaces, but also with the corpus that these systems have used to learn. There were a couple of Stanford researchers that trained AI to have "gaydar" — that study was widely discredited, but one, somebody thought to do that. And two, the study may have been discredited, but the algorithms and data are still out there. This is a problem. It's a problem that there aren't enough women in leadership positions — I advise Microsoft on their AI, and they know this, but there are not enough women as part of that process, and people of color are not part of that process. This is endemic.

Crain's: When we talk about trust and the media — there's the "fake news" bucket, but there's also the problem that our media organizations do not always reflect what our communities look like.

Webb: This has been going on forever. In the '80s, news organizations decided that the best new business model was suburban editions. Nobody lived inside of the cities that they were reporting on ... it just diffused news even more. That business model tanked. So here we are in the year 2018. How many women editors-in-chief are there in the United States? The answer is none, not in the major media markets.

Women rise to the level of head of human resources. PR. A COO here and there. But that's it. And you don't see women representation on boards of directors.

What I find fascinating is that all of our media organizations are (talking about how) diversity is important. The #MeToo movement came out of work that Jodi Kantor and her team did at the Times. So not only do our news organizations not reflect communities that they report on — and therefore their coverage is a little off — but the personnel don't reflect their coverage of women and people of color. And that's easy to change. But the way that you do it is, the people who are in charge of the organizations select their successors and choose people who reflect the values that their cities and communities have and that they themselves propagate.

Crain's: What are some things we can do now, as a community, to start moving toward an optimistic scenario for the future — one where we have regained some trust and started to dismantle this bias?

Webb: The first thing to do: Acknowledge that you're not already doing that. A few weeks ago there were mass layoffs announced at different newspapers — it really upset me. Because nobody's working in any meaningful way on the future, nobody in news and information. I tweeted a lot about this, on this particular day, and … I got a ton of blowback. I kept hearing, "We already have a new business model. We're doing events!"

We are literally standing not on the precipice of AI but in the thicket of it, and we are rapidly moving toward the next iteration of the third era of computing, where you don't have control over distribution or any understanding of how the data works, and you think events are going to save you? The best thing to do is acknowledge you aren't working on this in any meaningful way.

News organizations have no money, they have no R&D departments, I get all of that. If you're in that boat, find a hybrid team of people locally — quality people who can help you think through this who don't have anything else to gain — and create a data-driven road-map. In my experience, journalists are terrible at doing this. They're very good at reporting at what just happened and do a terrible job thinking about the future. So find someone else who knows how to do this.

I open-sourced everything last year. I did that because I'm on a mission to get us all oriented toward the optimistic (scenarios for the future). I cannot do it by myself. The only way for us to head in a better direction is to scale this futures thinking in a more meaningful way. But if I hear one more time, "We've already tried that, we've already done it," the answer to that is, No, you haven't.

Crain's: The digital divide in Detroit is very severe — a 2015 report based on Census data indicated that more than 50 percent of Detroit households did not have access to the internet. When we talk about access to information in terms of the kinds of devices we're using, how we're interfacing with those devices, we still have this baseline question of how many people are connected to the Internet.

Webb: Those gaps are just going to widen. What's really difficult is that we're moving into the next generation of internet connectivity, 5G, which is really not just about letting people watch videos faster. We're talking about connected cars. If they're not connected to the Internet, you have to wonder — what else are they disconnected from? There are lots of places around the country where you can no longer use cash in coffee shops. The lack of connectivity as a node connects to other areas of everyday life, like banking and transportation and education.

The longer it takes for Detroit to get caught up, the bigger that gap becomes. It's bad for those individuals, but there's also a business case to be made. If companies want to see the local economy flourish, they have a financial stake in making sure the people who live in Detroit are connected. That is going to help the economy grow. I don't know all the facts here, but this tells me that it's probably time for there to be meaningful public-private partnerships to address this.

Crain's: So how are you feeling about the future?

Webb:I'm feeling not great. However, I'm an optimist. So while I'm not feeling great given where we are today, there's always hope for tomorrow. I wake up every morning with a sense of dread, but also with the feeling that I can do something to fix what's coming, and that I can empower and help other people to create the futures that they want.

The next event in the Future of Information series brings danah boyd, founder and president of the research institute Data & Society, to the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn on June 20. More information is available here.